Welcome

This is an information guide on how to find information about patents and how to get copies of patent documents. It includes information from library resources as well as information available on the Internet.

Espacenet is the free patent database of the European Commission. It contains over 70,000,000 patents published since 1836. It also provides links to the patent offices of other countries such as Russian.

Patents on this site go back to 1790. The fulltext of patents are in the form of TIFF images before 1976 so software that can display such images will be needed. TIFF images are also used for displays of the original patent images for recent patents. The website has links to available software.

Additional Information

This website contains information on cooperation between the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office, and the Japanese Patent Office. It seeks to improve the quality and timeliness of patents and the patent process for all three agencies.